Check out Mixel: Social collaging for everyone

I had the pleasure of color-commenting a Layer Tennis match in which Khoi parried with Nicholas Felton last year. Afterwards we chatted a bit about whether & how the fun of “Photoshop tennis” could be brought to a radically wider audience. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of this new project, and I got to kick the tires while swinging through New York a few weeks back.

Two bits of interesting sauce:

Like Instagram, Mixel lets one follow & be followed, and it can import your existing connections.

The app keeps all pieces separate, making it easy to find artwork, see what’s trending, etc.

Khoi’s shown remarkable restraint in crafting the editing environment. Forget about things like complex layer blending: there’s no adding text* or even simple brush strokes. That’s by design: You’re meant to communicate visually rather than verbally, and drawing skills can’t be a prerequisite. Anyone should be able to jump in & participate immediately. It’s 180 degrees from most Adobe apps (which trade simplicity for power), and I find that refreshing.

It’ll be fascinating to see who tries the app, who sticks with it, what they make, and why. Will the rough aesthetic have legs, or will the app be drawn towards refinement & complexity? How might it grow to serve particular audiences (e.g. designers wanting to brainstorm/moodboard together in small groups)? We shall see.

In any case, congrats to these guys on the launch. What do you think of Mixel?

Lightroom 3.6, Camera Raw 6.6 available on Adobe Labs

Lightroom 3.6 and Camera Raw 6.6 are now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs. The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers.

New camera support in these releases:

Canon PowerShot S100

Nikon 1 J1

Nikon 1 V1

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1

Samsung NX5

In addition, the releases add support for numerous lens profiles while squashing a number of bugs. Please see the Lightroom Journal for details.

“Flash to Focus on PC/Mac Browsing & Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5”

Adobe VP Danny Winokur has published an official piece on how Adobe is pushing hard on HTML5 for mobile Web browsing, discontinuing work on Flash Player for mobile. I’m not an official Adobe spokesperson, and I don’t work on Flash, so please direct any comments to Danny’s post.